Many search providers, such as GOOGLE™ and YAHOO™, provide functionality for targeting a web search. For example, a user can search one or more particular domains or even sub-domains for a particular search string or other search parameters. This approach to searching, including sub-domain searches, has proven to have certain merits as many domain administrators provide search fields on their own web pages that are actually just implementations of targeted searches provided by the search provider.
However, a problem that arises with this type of targeted search is that the way in which Intranet or Internet websites are structured can pose difficulties that affect the ability of a system to provide accurate search results. In particular, the organization of websites into Internet or Intranet sub-domains can result in weighing or ranking steps that either exaggerate or underestimate the relevance of particular search results. This type of a sub-domain search will only weight a webpage based on references to that webpage existing within the specific sub-domain that includes the webpage. Thus, the search input is limited and this can effect the search results.
The following example illustrates this point. Two sub-domains may exist within a webpage, the first comprising general purpose information on a field of information, for example “Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence” and the second being dedicated to an exhaustive analysis of the field. The first sub-domain may comprise hundreds of web pages that mention “Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence” but just one webpage that has a single link to the second sub-domain. If a user is unaware of the second sub-domain and searches within the first sub-domain, there is only a small likelihood that the webpage containing the link to the second sub-domain will be provided to the user as a highly ranked search result.
A variety of search result collection and presentation inventions are provided in the prior art. U.S. Pat. No. 6,311,194 discloses a system and method for examining webpage content and specifically the metadata, to assign a set of attributes to the metadata to determine categories of information represented by the metadata, by way of a WordModel. The WordModel is operable to recognize metadata as representing a hierarchy of domains and is a comprehensive infrastructure for creating the Semantic Web from the existing Web including and for realizing the applications of Semantic Web including Semantic Search. WordModel can manifest itself in the form of a collection of XML documents, or as tables in a relational database.
U.S. Patent Application No. 2006/0015498 discloses another form of search engine invention. This invention is a system and method that undertakes a characterization of a user comprising obtaining a user's personal information, making inferences about personal characteristics. The personal characteristics are utilized to calculate a fitness value for websites for the user and ranking search results based on the fitness value. This fitness value is utilized to control the presentation of search results to a user.
U.S. Patent Application No. 2009/0006372 discloses yet another invention directed to providing search results to a user. In particular, this invention is a system, method and software to automatically reorder search results presented to users based on information specific to the user or the computing environment of the user.